I’m wondering what camera would be best for this kind of thing? I’d love to make some.
83 karma · joined January 23, 2021
Maybe one of the first.
We tend to give the impression that we’ve figured almost everything out, and so you’re just learning the facts of it all.
Really, we’ve carved out a little island in a sea of ignorance, and the foundations of the island are just our current best rough approximations that might collapse.
An example from the field I’m in — biology. It’s quite likely that if you worked at it you can describe a new species in your backyard. You don’t have to go to the Amazon rainforest, there’s scientific unknowns all around you all the time.
Language to me is a kind of slow and inexact medium that we use to try to describe the stuff of thought.
It probably makes us capable of thinking things that we otherwise might not. For example, it would take a big imaginative leap to conceptualize “the universe” for the first time. But since we have that word now it’s trivial for any of us.
But in my own head I don’t think of the words “the universe”, I think of something like an image or representation of the concept of the universe that usually just arises without an accompanying word.
Animals think like this too, I’m sure. Tell your dog “you wanna go for a ride in the car?”. He knows the car, he knows rides, and this knowledge is what comes up in his mind, not the word “the car”. And he’s probably thinking of stuff like this all the time without being triggered to do so by a word.
I only mentally “verbalize” it when I’m trying to be really careful in my thinking, or in certain other situations.
The first way is much faster and more efficient to me.
The only issue is that there’s a critical window in there that shapes your accent.
They’re just as social and emotional as dogs are.
Intelligence wise, dogs are probably a bit smarter. But how much, I don’t know, they don’t seem that radically different.
If we saw significant changes to where is wet and where is dry, we’d be scrambling to catch up and the fallout could be pretty large.
If we actually thought like this and prepared ourselves in this manner during good times it’d increase the resilience of our species so profoundly.
It’s more just sharing things like birth control technology and education.
This whole discussion is actually a sort of win-win scenario, because what proves to lower birth rates more effectively than anything is improved regional health, education, and wealth, so helping along those factors is the biggest impact.
We don’t want 12-14 billion humans. The biosphere is already under enormous stress.
We do already have carbon capture systems that are more effective per unit area than plants at capturing carbon.
I say this as someone biased in the opposite direction, forest ecology is my career!
Think about any modern scientist. Has their creativity been boosted by the existence of all the other scientists?
If I’m a physicist, the existence of Newton boosted my creativity because now I can apply calculus to problems. If I’m a biologist, Im leaning on Darwin and all the insights of statisticians and the people who have delineated the methods and findings around which I organize my science.
People have previously innovated the concepts, methods, and foundational understandings, and finding new insight can be a matter of combining these in novel ways.
I don’t think this is completely different than what the author is describing in TikTok. Both the format and ecosystem of tools that the service creates, and the social network of users create an environment where it’s easier to go out and make something.
A similar thing happens in science.
Or fantastic and courageous minds responding to some cultural or historical material?
(Which would be much in the way a TikToker responds to a meme while adding some of their own spice).
Let’s not get bogged down by the fact that one domain might be perceived as more valuable/respected and the other not so.
What have philosophers ever done post-Socrates except come across the ecosystem of historical philosophers and riff off of that?
This is pretty interesting as it is a problem I struggle with too.
Your landing page there reminds me of something else I’m a fan of, e.g. Building a Second Brain through notes and web clips as discussed here: https://tanners.blog/diy-second-brain/
But these are more focused solely on the background processes of organizing information.
I’m curious about how your system would encourage publishing, “even if it’s a bit disjointed”, as that seems kind of the logical next step. (And definitely a challenge for me too!)
I think the book Steal Like an Artist addresses this.
They did it in British Columbia.
I’m a big fan of this approach, which is actually bipartisan-ly designed.
Check the video in that link.
A while back I trained myself to observe plants, birds, etc.
There will be stuff going on like a hawk swooping in to kill a bird and nobody even notices but me, just because my brain is sort of cued in to notice those things. There’s a nest with several hawks, and also a little falcon that hunts rodents about 3x per day, both right next to my house in neighboring yards but I never even noticed them before this.
It’s all about what you train your brain to notice, and once you start, you start to see it everywhere. If plants or animals are salient to you, you’ll notice them. If not, you won’t.